If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.

I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

I love Dune but that game is so powerfully unappealing to me… I didn’t play it so maybe I got the wrong impression from a few minutes of gameplay but it read to me like every generic crafting-survival-base-building live service game from the last 15 years since MC and DayZ. Does it do something subversive or is it really just Rust on Arrakis?

Sure, but I don’t think Waterfall is going to save you from the soul-crushingness in such an environment.

How much of it is due to Agile (which is a very broad concept even though some people mistakenly equate it with scrum), and how much is it due to corporate pressures and inadequate processes though?

I find Agile conceptually meshes a lot better with “standard” product and solutions development thanks to the tighter feedback loops and increased reliance on local expertise over centralized planning. This only gets truer as project complexity grows.

However some companies try to make Agile work with top-down decision making and/or hard deadlines, which are deadly antipatterns. As for lack of time/resources and/or timesheet micro-management, this isn’t a problem unique to Agile nor something that waterfall is exempt from.

Good agile teams are mostly independent and can define their own testing/release cycle as required for a given project; though of course when that happens there are at least a couple layers of management who feel a burning itch to stuff their dirty nosed where they don’t belong because if the team succeeds despite their lack of direct involvement then everyone might realize the emperor has no pants.

That may be true in some truly well organized (usually “legacy big corpo” companies).

Where I’ve worked it’s more like:

• Requirements only cover user-facing features, if that. (Not so) senior engineers are left to bridge the gap between UI mockups and literally everything else.
• Implementation issue is accidentally introduced
• Priority on the bug is lower than new features so no-one has any way to justify working on it
• One day a dev might be personally annoyed enough by the issue that they fix the part as part of some tangentially related work. Else it stays like that forever.

That is a basic side-effect of Agile development. If you have implementation details figured out to such an extent before writing the code, you are not doing agile, you are doing waterfall. Which has a time and a place, but that time and place is typically banking or medical or wherever you’re okay with spending several times the time and money to get maximum reliability (which is a different metric than quality!).

I bet NVIDIA has driver crashes to figure out, and I know which of those issues I’d want them to focus on first if I used their windows driver.

Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it’s just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.

You know, maybe my grandparents had it right.

It is weird that computers give so little sensory feedback for what they’re doing. Flashlights go click. Cassette decks go clack-vrrrr. Whiteboards go squeek-squeek. Screen sharing goes… nothing, just a small mostly white rectangle on top of my much bigger rectangle until a disembodied, 4 kHz-wide simulacrum of someone’s voice from halfway around the world says “yeah we see your screen”. Unnatural is what it is.

High-five the group of Belgian, Chadian, and Romanian vexillologists who were also sweating profusely throughout.

What?

The house I’m sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American “just wrap it all in vinyl” approach that aren’t necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

The problem isn’t air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won’t rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that’s easily avoided by decent house building.

Dry wood will last centuries without any oiling. Which is good news for timber frames because those are left untreated. As long as your house is water-tight, the frame will be fine because wood rot simlly can’t metabolize in typical indoors humidity evels.

What we typically protect wood from is water, mechanical wear, UV, and stains. But even a furniture piece will not always get treated on internal parts where wear and wood expansion are no concerns.

I work in the industry (not MSFT) on cloud reliability so I have insight.

• The cloud itself is not as stable as some people may think. Standard is 99.9 % uptime. Which sounds great, but if your DB is 99.9 % and your compute is 99.9% and your storage is 99.9 % and your network and so on and any one of those going out breaks your application, then you don’t have 99.9 % but (99.9 %)^n which is a lot less impressive. You can make things fault-tolerant through redundancy but that comes with great complexity which can cause outages of its own.
• Apps like teams, like most B2B bullshit, provide added value by bundling together as much shit as possible. Chat, calls, calendar, spreadsheets, you name it. So now any one of those features going out individually can impact the whole app.
• Every one of those features in the bundle is managed by a different team, possibly in a different country and coming from a different company acquisition. So now you have to glue unrelated tech stacks together which is super expensive.
• The way you bundle things together in a SPA in a corporate environment with finite resources is by basically bundling together a bunch of iframes. Ever notice that the calendar tab on teams sometimes tells you to refresh your page to get new credentials? That’s why, this fucking thing bundles its own authentication lib and barely talks to MS Teams so it can’t properly refresh its tokens! If you like having one product’s technical debt, now think about having 20 products’ technical debt all conveniently forced to interact together in one web page!

Honestly I’m impressed by how well teams works with the very severe constraints they clearly have. Shit’s got more moving parts than Ryanair’s entire fleet and it only breaks once in a while.

The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.

So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs (“ils mangent”) is silent because the “ent” sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn’t for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.

Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it’s all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can’t spell “nénuphar” properly. Children’s purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.

Running Linux on closed source hardware. Classic.

I bet you aren’t even using your own open RISC-V based SBC, with fully open-source peripherals. Is your computer monitor even running an open-source firmware or are you just a FOSS poser?

I’ve mostly got experience with Battlefield in that genre but if you’re getting repeatedly killed by “campers” you’re playing the game wrong, aka aiming for KDR instead of PTFO.

Believe it or not devs are aware of the mechanical advantages of long-range weapons, so in-game objectives are intentionally littered with crates and boxes and walls to provide cover from “camping spots”. The ones getting repeatedly killed are noobs who keep walking around the objective, in the open, because they are scared of all the cover positions which might hide an enemy.

Well too fucking bad sugarlips, stop being a little bitch and rush in. Better to die clearing out the cover spots for your teammates to capture the objective than to a useless game of skeet that doesn’t generate any benefit for either team. I don’t care that you have a KDR of 1.2 and “you would have gotten more if it wasn’t for the campers”, you captured exactly zero flags and so as far as I’m concerned you’re dead weight.

… Wow sorry about that, I guess I got post-traumatic gamer rage on this topic lol

This can be - and has been - generalized to all industrualization.

Tolkien wrote Isengard the way he did for a reason.

The history of Brutalist architecture is closely associated with fascism as it promotes societal ideals of a neatly segmented and ordered life.

Henry Ford. Just, Henry Ford.

Elon’s technocratic nazi grandfather.

I would also like to remind everyone that fascism is simultaneously extremely dangerous but doomed to fail. That obsession for finding rigid rules where there aren’t any, of constraining the real world to simplified models, makes fascists eventually lose touch with reality because they can’t account for the messiness and human factor. At first they destroy everything they touch, kill anyone that doesn’t fit the model. They then make fatal, obviously irrational mistakes like opening an Eastern front in Europe before tidying up the Western one because the Ideology says Bolsheviks are weak. Attacking the US in Hawaii. Not installing Lidar in supposedly self-driving cars. Invading Ukraine with an incompetent army and cardboard supplies against a dug-in western-supplied army.

It’s not particularly helpful to the tens of millions killed by fascism yet, but at least we can rest assured that the fascist technosolutionists will lose and that plants will grow out of their corpse.

That’s what happens when you woke out and become more focused on arguing instead of coding

Comments are gold lol. You heard it first here folks, Rust is Woke.

Having talked to people who were in charge of making some strategic decisions regarding a business messaging application…

Slack/Discord is “too complex and confusing”. Apparently the pile of unsorted chats, group chats, and meeting chats, are superior to Discord’s threading model.

Also corpos literally do not notice that teams is slow as molasses which is a big part of the friction. You could show them a perfect demonstration that Teams’ UI is so much slower to react to anything (nevermind load the actual resource) than the competition and that they often have a 1000+ms audio RTT in meetings (not a hyperbole) and the business people would be like “yeah, I guess? Who cares?”

Corporate types literally can’t understand that bad audio and audio latency costs a huge percentage of revenue in lost productivity because everyone’s constantly talking over each other and simultaneously being too afraid to speak because the audio delay makes it impossible to fit into a lull in the conversation and also everyone is in a competition for the tiniest shittiest mic with the worst noise canceling that somehow stacks on top of Teams’ pretty bad noise cancelation such that their voice is being noise canceled and you’re just left with like 1.2 kHz of actual range and somehow everyone seems fine to spend their entire day listening to that and aaaaaaaaa I have a headache and I want to die

Then after work you get on a discord call with the mates and everyone is crystal clear with no noticeable latency, even the students on a secondhand 30 € gaming headset.

Yeah. What kind of GenAI would be so shitty to render something with so many artifacts, yet coherent enough to render 24 words that perfectly map to their direct French translation? But somehow the pictures are half jumbled to the point that the picture of a tail looks like a circle? Which is the opposite way GenAI normally jumbles things, text is always the first to become undecipherable.

The only way for this to be GenAI would be with close supervision, it’s not impossible but at that point it would have been much less effort for a much better result to edit English text onto an actual French children’s book.

Anyway who gives a shit but the superior attitude of the people here who think they are so clever pisses me off lol